Lissa McCullough JCRT 9.3 Fall 2008 - Journal for Cultural and

13 Pages·2008·0.16 MB·English

LISSA MCCULLOUGH
Los Angeles, California

DEATH OF GOD REPRISE:
ALTIZER, TAYLOR, VATTIMO, CAPUTO, VAHANIAN

Review of Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir.
Foreword by Mark C. Taylor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
xviii + 191 pp. ISBN 0791467570

John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God. Edited by Jeffrey W.
Robbins. Afterword by Gabriel Vahanian. New York: Columbia University Press,
2007. 204 pp. ISBN 9780231141246

Mark C. Taylor, After God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xviii + 416
pp. ISBN 0226791696

Th ese recent titles by a few seasoned cultural critics analyzing what the
death of God continues to mean for theology, religion, faith, culture, and
life in general, are significant for the common ground they share and for
the criticisms that crisscross between them, sometimes identifying each other by
name. In his latest book, After God, Mark C. Taylor alludes to a “looming
disaster” and “peril” before which “it is difficult not to despair,” as he postulates
that the most pressing dangers we currently face result from the conflict of
competing absolutisms that divide the world between oppositions that can never
be mediated.i Nothing is more dangerous, in his view, than the growing
devotion to dualistic either/or ideologies in a neither/nor world (AG, 349).
Thomas J. J. Altizer’s most recent book, a theological memoir titled Living the
Death of God, understands the deepest challenge of our time as a fathoming of the
depths of darkness enveloping us in the form of nihilism, a nihilism brought on
by the death of God and the end of our historical world.ii As compared with
Taylor, Altizer pursues a more intimate and interior struggle—his effort is to
generate a light of active understanding in the darkness, a movement of life that
would transfigure the satanic subjection that is the apocalypse of our world into
an actively sustainable Ereignis, to borrow Heidegger’s term.iii “If only through
Heidegger, we can know that nihilism is an ultimate question for us, and yet it is
extraordinarily difficult to understand nihilism, and there is certainly no
common understanding of nihilism at hand” (LDG, 165). He points out that we
can hardly be sanguine in this task given that Nietzsche, our nineteenth-century
forefather in this effort, was “shattered” by the attempt to conquer nihilism.

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Viewed in tandem, Taylor’s analysis offers a more outward focus on, let us call it,
the abyss between, coping with the chaotic tempest of absolutist ideological
passions and conflicts unleashed by the death of God and the correlative
technological transformation of our world, while Altizer’s preoccupation is with
the abyss within, coping with the engulfing darkness and silence of a universally
negative theophany, which for him is manifestly nameable as an apotheosis of
Death. “Nothing more clearly distinguishes a uniquely modern vision than does
its deep ground in evil, or in a pure negativity, a pure negativity wholly
unknown in the ancient world, or in a pre-Christian world” (LDG, 37). In this
overwhelming midst, Altizer’s method is to seek a dialectic that would enact a
salvific wholeness, a yes-saying apocalyptic joy, that can only evade us as long as
we dwell in an unmediated undialectical “night,” a night of univocal nihilism
without relief, and, equally, as long as we opt for an unmediated undialectical
“light,” a light of heavenly salvation or cheap grace divorced from the evil and
damnation that constitute our actual world. For it is our real world of horror, of
disaster and devastation, that cries to be transformed, or transfigured, if genuine
transfiguration is to occur. Nothing less than this will suffice for redemptive joy
to be authentic, rather than an evasion of our deepest responsibility.

Altizer’s theology has always battled against two undialectical antipodes: on the
one hand, a pure nihilism that would vanquish all joy in an unrelieved night of
horror, a no-without-yes, and, on the other hand, a pure gnosticism or
“spiritualism” that would void joy of its constitutive darkness, and in that sense
deprive it of the power to “save” or “redeem” anything whatsoever, a yes-
without-no, for “how is it possible to understand redemption if we cannot
understand damnation? . . . And how can Christ truly be known apart from
Satan?” (LDG, 39). Certainly, Altizer’s lifework has wagered that the temptation
to escape from real life and actual history, repairing to a realm of illusory light, is
ultimately the more perilous danger. We are better off facing straight on the
dread beast of nihilism—the fiercest of all opponents inasmuch as it defies every
possible illusion—wrestling with it however we can.

So Altizer’s strategy is a relentlessly negative dialectic: a yes-only-through-no.
While this is modeled on an Hegelian dialectic, to be sure, it is a post-
Nietzschean variant that privileges total negativity, “a total No,” as the condition
of interior redemption (LDG, 87). “Negate thyself” is its command; no
triumphalism of Spirit is possible, God is dead, paradise is lost, and embodied
spirit can find authentic salvation only in a lost paradise—or as William Blake
expressed this, it “builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”iv Altizer recapitulates this
principle in his memoir:

One of the principles that I absorbed as a theological student is that
genuine faith cannot only absorb the deepest possible challenge but that
it becomes even more truly faith in meeting such a challenge. Once again
Augustine is a true model here, but so, too, are Pascal and Kierkegaard
and Dostoevsky. Is such a movement of faith impossible in late
modernity? A dialectical principle is fully present here, that the deepest
or truest faith is not possible apart from the deepest No to that faith, and

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this principle is fully present in all genuine apocalypticism, for an
apocalyptic light can only be manifest and real in the purest darkness,
just as that light itself can only dawn in a horizon of total darkness. (LDG
91)

While Altizer trusts in a yet more comprehensive dialectic, an über-dialectic that
would imbue Hegelian method with all the shattering iconoclastic negations of
Blake, Nietzsche, and their more recent heirs, an approach he calls “Yes and No,”
Taylor trusts in a Neither/Nor that would outfox the logic of dialectic from
within. Taylor locates hope for creativity and new life in a Derridean evasion of
dialectic through the play of difference. “The imagination,” Taylor argues,
“involves the interplay of figuring and disfiguring in which there are two
moments—one constructive, the other deconstructive.” Because figures have as
the condition of their figuration something that cannot be figured, figures are
“always disfigured as if from within” (AG, 307, 20). Figures are breached by an
“interior exteriority” that, by disfiguring them, leaves them open for further
emergence.

But the capacity to refigure, which is the creative moment, must not be squelched
by a poststructural insistence on difference that becomes so totalizing that it
disallows any commonality, unity, or wholeness, banning the very possibility of
figuration. Instead, Taylor argues, the refiguration that should be privileged is
that involving nontotalizing structures that nonetheless act as wholes—as
complex adaptive networks do. Complexity that responds and adapts as if it
were a whole constitutes the neither/nor. “The neither/nor of complexity
simultaneously makes possible and renders incomplete the both/and of monism
and the either/or of dualism. The complexity of this neither/nor harbors the
theoretical resources and practical principles for negotiating the conflicts of the
twenty-first century” (AG, 310). Taylor intends a faith structure characterized by
live responsiveness, creativity, resilient adaptivity, an ability to organize itself
and thrive not as a fixed identity or dialectical binary, but as a self-configuring
and -reconfiguring, and indeed self-disfiguring, complex system.

If Altizer’s two chief worries for faith are nihilism and modern gnosticism,
Taylor’s are the complementary inadequacies of monism and dualism. Taylor
envisions an adaptive faith that accommodates complexity and figures
wholeness without suppressing difference or insisting on identity. For this to be
possible, both monist and dualist thinking would have to be displaced by
complex emergent interconnectivity, the “one” that is “many” corroborative
events in tandem, that achieves “wholeness” only by virtue of functional
differentiation, multiplicity, and complex emergent co-adaptivity.

Monism and dualism are both theologies of death: in the former,
individual differences collapse in the entropic totality where Eros
becomes Thanatos; in the latter, oppositional differences negate
themselves by destroying each other. To overcome this destructive
nihilism, it is necessary to cultivate emergent creativity in complex

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adaptive networks that figure, disfigure, and refigure what once was
believed to be the substance of things seen and unseen. (AG, 311–12)

Taylor and Altizer both attempt to confront a thoroughgoing nihilism—as
manifested in its many protean forms today—hence both are concerned with the
possibility of sustaining faith in the midst of nihilistic darkness. Their contrasting
external/internal focus becomes manifest here. With his eye on the multiplicity
of interreligious conflicts, Taylor accents the need for faith to serve as a kind of
anti-absolutist, interrelationist praxis for living creatively in a twenty-first-
century world, commending “a faith that embraces uncertainty and insecurity as
conditions of creative emergence,” which “harbors the only hope that remains”
(xviii, 185). Altizer, by contrast, remains focused on the disaster within historical
Christianity, digging into that disaster as its own most powerful resource for
transfiguring itself: “Naming the enemy is a genuine theological challenge, but
every real theologian knows that the enemy is most deeply within, and most
deeply within faith itself” (LDG, 104–105). Altizer contends that the challenge to
Christianity can only be met by “a deep inquiry within Christianity itself” (LDG,
104).

Far from providing a praxis for a less conflictual and violent world, Altizer
understands faith as a self-immolating wrestling with the beast that is one’s own
deepest and darkest consciousness—hence his embrace of Nietzsche as his
theological master, one who is a theological master by virtue of being “the
greatest anti-theological thinker in history” (LDG, 88). The genre of the memoir
has allowed Altizer to divulge more forthrightly, even downright confessionally,
what is palpable in his theological oeuvre overall: a passion for theology (102) as
the calling of a sick soul (106), which he has experienced as a curse (181), the
lifelong fruit of which is nothing less than a hatred and horror of God (105). For
“surely there is no more terrible deity in the history of religions” than the
Christian God, a God who is well masked by theologians as “incomprehensible”
given that he is “too terrible to contemplate” (105).

Frankly, I genuinely respect those who are repulsed by an Augustine, a
Luther, or a Kierkegaard. I do believe that they are our deepest
pathologists, or deepest apart from Nietzsche; yet Nietzsche truly
belongs within this tradition… These are the very thinkers who call forth
the most terrible God, that God who has predestined all humanity to an
eternal Hell, and only released from that inevitable destiny a tiny elect
whom He has freely and gratuitously chosen, and the very Heaven given
this elect is inseparable from the eternity and the sheer horror of Hell.
(LDG, 105)

The dominant stream of modernity was determined to awaken from this
nightmare of God, and it began to succeed to “forget” (repress?) judgment,
damnation, and hell as the principal institutions of God’s inscrutable justice.
Nonetheless, Altizer considers Kafka the purest witness to God in the twentieth
century (LDG, 106), a hidden God who is “visible” only in the form of absolute
judgment, overwhelming guilt, and immense darkness created by the

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unattainable light of the law. All of us know God, Altizer claims, insofar as we
can name our deepest darkness (LDG, 180). In exorcising this nightmare, the
consuming abyss within, a healthy-minded turn to superficial atheism is
insufficient. A radical theology of implosion is the only therapy.

Yes, this may be a disaster, but it is uniquely our disaster, a disaster of our
historical-spiritual making, and we cannot pretend that we have another calling,
Altizer thinks, or imagine that we can evade or set aside this unfinished,
unresolved project in our deepest consciousness (our “souls”) or our world.
Before we will see clearly to recommend any “religious” strategies to others or
move forward ourselves in a global society, we must contend with the log in our
own eye—that “log” that is our God and his history. That God is “dead” does not
make him less powerful. Indeed, it only makes him more dangerous, his
authority more oppressive—or repressive as the case may be. This is not a job for
Christian theologians alone, or for Christian believers and ex-believers alone, but
for anyone involved enough in the disaster to feel called to help sort it out. The
wound, having been inflicted in the world, lies open to the world, and anyone in
the world is justified to respond. Admittedly, Altizer does not overtly say this,
but his appeal to a universal audience is implicit. His use of “we” does not
narrow-mindedly assume that his reader is Christian, only that his reader, for
better or worse, has been “touched” by the Christian God.

The enormous power of this God as it has been manifest outwardly historically is
a power rooted within—embedded in the deepest levels of Western
consciousness and unconsciousness. Hence to become liberated from this God,
Altizer believes, the event of liberation must be an interior process, as no exterior
treatment can achieve release where the grip has been strongest. This explains
Altizer’s gratitude to modern writers such as Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett, who take
on God’s power imaginatively through subversive irony, grotesquery, and
blasphemy, for “even Nietzsche pales in the wake of Finnegans Wake” (LDG, 25).
Only the lèse majesté of blasphemy and heresy can transfigure the terrors and
curses of the God within, converting his Satanic lacerations into the stripes of
Christ, the Lamb who saves.

Indeed, Altizer expresses bafflement that the imaginative visions of God by
writers and artists in modernity are so much more powerful and alive than the
unimaginative treatments of God by modern theologians. He contrasts the
embarrassment of riches provided in the epic visions of Dante, Milton, Blake,
and Joyce with the stultifying lack of imagination and deadened conservatism
among modern theologians. “In many ways theologians are their own worst
enemies, for we find it impossible to believe that we have been given such
opportunities, impossible to believe in the grace of theology itself”; “how ironic
that our imaginative vision should be so richly theological whereas our
theological thinking is so constricted and confined” (LDG, 26, 42). Altizer
confesses that he felt most encouraged in his theological calling by
nontheological colleagues, by literary scholars and the like, “nontheologians who
knew far more deeply than I did that ultimate crisis which had become our
destiny, a crisis shattering modernity itself, and therefore dissolving modernity’s

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comprehensive negation of theology itself” (LDG, 24). Certainly contemporary
theologians are in denial of cultural reality to the extent that they ignore and
neglect the idea of the death of God, which is perhaps the signature idea shaping
modern history and consciousness. Altizer points out that the profound
theological negations of Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche “are truly missing in
modern theology,” which makes him wonder whether a truly “modern”
theology has yet been conceived (LDG, 94).

Well, let it be said, those who have had it with the Christian God’s torturous
history and want a swift exit will have no patience with Altizer and are better off
turning to Taylor for a new territory for faith. Taylor, in refiguring faith’s twenty-
first century possibilities, is looking for new paths to health and wholeness rather
than battling moribund disease and pathology. But precisely the healthy-minded
intent of Taylor’s effort can make its prescriptions seem a bit abstract and unreal,
too easily recommending a remove from the abiding temptations of absolutist
metaphysics, and too unlike any “religion” or “faith” we actually know.v Taylor
is prospecting for a “religion without God,” an “ethics without absolutes,” and
possibly he is right that this is the thing most needful in our time—but it is also
the thing most absent. So despite his strongly pragmatic orientation, in a sense
Taylor is the greater idealist as compared with Altizer. While Altizer confronts
an actual disaster, Taylor quests for a more adaptive, less absolutist “religion”
that hardly seems to exist today, at least as a position conscious of itself as such.

What is “religion” that we should be justified not only in our aspiration to study
it, but to practice it “after God” and “without God”? Both Altizer and Taylor
remark on how “religion” has been analyzed by recent scholars as a modern
categorial invention and betrayal of that which it seeks to name. Altizer points
out that Karl Barth was able to use (or abuse) this category theologically by
positing an absolute dichotomy between religion and faith (LDG, 53). Partaking
of this strategy to an extent, Altizer seeks to loosen faith as a free-thinking
theological quest from “religion” as a social and institutional system. Taylor, on
the other hand, embraces faith in the form of “religion” rather than theology on
the grounds that theology’s heyday is over “after God.” Reviewing critiques of
“religion” as a constructed category by Jonathan Z. Smith and others, yet
seemingly undaunted by them, Taylor puts forward a definition of religion that
he considers adequate because it is based on a theory of complex adaptive
systems, and includes a stabilizing and a destabilizing moment in its structure:
“Religion is an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths and
rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in
ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other, disrupt, dislocate,
and disfigure every stabilizing structure” (AG, 12). A de-absolutized religion is a
religion conscious of itself as “without God” that may nonetheless be “after God”
in the sense that it is a faith incarnate in the form of the eternal restlessness of
becoming (AG, 377). Taylor intends the ambiguous meaning of “after” to include
chasing after an ever elusive ultimacy or infinitude: “after is never present as
such but is the approaching withdrawal and withdrawing approach that allow
presence to be present” (AG, 345). This leads Taylor to make the most definitive
theological statements in After God, that “the Infinite is not God but is always

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after the God who is after it”: “the true Infinite is neither dualistic nor monistic
but is the creative interplay in which identity and difference are codependent
and coevolve” (AG, 345, 346).

God is not the ground of being that forms the foundation of all beings
but the figure constructed to hide the originary abyss from which
everything emerges and to which all returns. While this abyss is no
thing, it is not nothing—neither being nor nonbeing, it is the anticipatory
wake of the unfigurable that disfigures every figure as if from within.
Far from simply destructive, disfiguring is the condition of the
possibility of creative emergence. (AG, 345)

Reading this definition of God might help us to understand why Nietzsche
admired Emerson, for here Taylor seems to have identified the moment in which
a post-Christian deconstructive thinking reinvents the perennial philosophy on
its own terms.

Despite his resolutely post-Christian stance, Taylor’s strongly intentional and
prescriptive approach to “religion” in After God is unexpectedly reminiscent, I
find, of the work of the Harvard theologian Gordon D. Kaufman. Both accent
relativization (as against absolutization), coherence with evolutionary biology (as
against biblical Creationism), and the critical role of creative novelty in human
existence. But Taylor is more embracing of organic-mimetic metaphors, hence his
accent on “emergent self-organization” through “complex dynamic
morphogenesis” as opposed to Kaufman’s self-conscious “construction” as an
image for how post-critical religious figuration occurs. Undoubtedly, Taylor’s
notion of “religion without God” would seem most palatable to those who think
of themselves as least religious. It could be that the strongest appeal of Taylor’s
“religion”—like the widespread appeal of Paul Tillich’s theology in the 1950s—
will occur among “secular” people exploring the possibility of being more
“religious” than they know. Indeed, it is one of the key arguments of Taylor’s
book that “secularity is a religious phenomenon” that grows out of the Judeo-
Christian tradition as it develops in Protestantism, that secularity covertly
continues a religious agenda (AG 132), and concomitantly that there is an
“unrecognized religious dimension of globalization” that is Protestant through
and through (AG, 3, 44).

Taylor’s take on secularization closely parallels that of Gianni Vattimo in After the
Death of God, the third recently published volume under consideration here, who
contends that an adequate theory of secularization would recognize in many
traits of the modern world the basic features of Christianity (ADG 97–98).vi He
argues that “we” (like Altizer’s “we”) modern secularists cannot but speak from
a Christian point of view, because “we are fundamentally incapable of
formulating ourselves, fundamentally incapable of articulating a discourse,
except by accepting certain culturally conditioned premises,” which include the
liberation narratives of the Bible, Christian moral teachings, in short, the
historical impact of Christianity. Pushing this point very far, Vattimo ventures

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the notion that “Voltaire was a good Christian” because by standing for freedom
against authoritarianism, he stood for Christianity (ADG, 36–37, 97).
In recent books that wax biographical at points, Vattimo has confessed that after
a religious youth, which was followed by a period of disenchantment, he
experienced the paradox of recovering Christianity through Nietzsche and
Heidegger.vii This unexpected recovery of Christianity through the key thinkers
of nihilism caused him, he attests, to accept secularization as “a constitutive
aspect of the history of Being, and therefore of the history of salvation, for our
way of living the return of religion” (AC, 25). This embrace of secularization as
intrinsic to Christianity’s destiny allows Vattimo to advance his “apology for
nihilism” in The End of Modernity, claiming that our destiny is to become
“accomplished nihilists” who understand nihilism as our sole opportunity.viii He
finds this strong affirmation in Nietzsche, as Nietzsche realized that the
occurrence of the death of God corresponds to the dissolution of metaphysics
(ADG, 91). Likewise, Vattimo considers Heidegger to be part of the history of the
accomplishment of nihilism, despite Heidegger’s hope that it is possible to go
beyond nihilism, for “nihilism seems to be precisely that mode of thought
beyond metaphysics for which he is looking” (EM, 20). Not only does
hermeneutics lead to nihilism, but nihilism appears only thanks to the work of
hermeneutics (ADG, 103).

In After the Death of God, Vattimo sets his sights on an emergent and hoped for
Christianity—deeply paralleling Altizer at this point—precisely through the
deepening impact of nihilism: “Christianity is a stimulus, a message that sets in
motion a tradition of thought that will eventually realize its freedom from
metaphysics” (ADG, 35). Given that Vattimo defines metaphysics as the “violent
imposition of an order that is declared objective and natural” (ADG, 93), treated
as inviolable and beyond discussion, he welcomes nihilism as an incomparable
liberator.

Our tradition is dominated by the idea that if we only had a stable
foundation we could move and act more freely. But philosophical
foundationalism does not promote freedom. Rather, it is for the purpose
of obtaining some desired effect or of consolidating some authority.
When someone wants to tell me the absolute truth it is because he wants
to put me under his control, under his command. . . . The future of
Christianity, and also of the Church, is to become a religion of pure love,
always more purified. . . . The truth that is able to set us free is “true”
precisely because it frees us. (ADG, 43, 45)

So Vattimo welcomes accomplished nihilism’s power to release Christianity from
the historical religion’s own alien tenets—to de-foundationalize and de-
absolutize the liberative faith and the call to love that is Christianity’s essential
impetus; he hopes to see Christianity purified by a progressive reduction of “all
inflexible categories that lead to opposition,” citing the examples of property,
blood, excesses of absolutism (ADG, 45). While Vattimo’s de-foundationalized
Christianity seems less abstract than the generic “religion” of which Taylor
writes, it may plausibly be viewed as the concrete instantiation, in the case of one

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historical tradition, of the de-absolutizing and risk-accepting spirit that Taylor is
recommending for all “religions.”

Vattimo’s stance on Christianity is remarkably consonant with Altizer’s more
fully elaborated and sophisticated analysis of the Christian faith’s historical self-
annihilation, though Altizer’s oeuvre is virtually unknown to Vattimo, as the
latter openly states (ADG, 91–92). Here a bit of advice is not out of place for those
with ears to hear: anyone pursuing questions of Christianity and nihilism should
read the post-1960s Altizer, who through sustained systematic work has
established himself as the leading contemporary thinker of theological nihilism.
Altizer’s most mature contributions to this field begin in 1970 and continue in the
four decades thereafter; especially recommended for their systematic coherence
are Genesis and Apocalypse (1990), The Genesis of God (1993), and Godhead and the
Nothing (2003).

John D. Caputo’s passing critique of Altizer in After the Death of God suggests that
he has not seriously encountered Altizer’s later work. He objects that in Altizer’s
kenotic theology the “absolute center” shifts from transcendence to immanence,
so that “the full presence of a transcendent God was transported to the plane of
immanence” (ADG, 68). Caputo imagines that this is what Altizer means by
“total presence” in his later work. Taylor’s critique of Altizer in After God makes
a similar error—though in his case it is clear he has read Altizer’s mature
oeuvre.ix As Taylor interprets Altizer, “in the Incarnation, the transcendent God
who had been absent from space and time becomes totally present in history”
(AG, 202). Not at all: this is an utterly undialectical reading of Altizer. What
Caputo and Taylor do not grasp is that “total presence” in Altizer is the presence
of a total absence, and indeed could more aptly be named “total absence”: it is
the final and irreversible annihilation of transcendence, which releases a
universal negativity or actual nothingness that Altizer calls “perishing,” a
consuming groundlessness whose wake necessarily eliminates the very
distinction between transcendence and immanence. Here Taylor is keen in his
observation that “Altizer ends by rendering difference indifferent” (AG, 204); or,
as I would rather put it, there is only one difference that matters ultimately for
Altizer, and that is the irrevocable difference between God transcendent and God
crucified: the Passion. In Altizer there is no Parousia of presence; to the contrary,
there is only universal perishing, nihilism without end, and it is this consuming
nothingness in the form of universal perishing that is “totally present,” not God
or a substantial immanence. The “absolute center” that is everywhere is a God-
immolating black hole, and this actuality is the Cross upon which all things are
born to perish in imitatio Dei. Altizer argues that this dissolution of God is not a
merely private experience, a personal subjective “piety,” but a broadly historical
movement in which “we” all participate, like it or not. Which is to say that even
in death God continues to be a public not a private concern.

While Altizer finds Christian light and joy in this darkness, perhaps it is a
healthy-minded horror of such darkness that incites his critics to imagine in its
place precisely the opposite: a “metaphysics of immanent presence” (Caputo on
Altizer, ADG, 68). Certainly this straw man is easier to critique than the relentless

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dark night that Altizer actually proposes. Caputo makes clear that for him
deconstruction of God clears the way for a more “upbeat” position than those of
Altizer and Taylor:

The more some people use the word God the more I find myself praying
to God for the death of God, asking God to rid us of God, to cite a very
famous mystic. There is surely something to be gained from undertaking
a deconstruction of the name of God precisely under the auspices of a
“death” of God. . . . The work of burning off the old metaphysics of
omnipotence, which can never cease, must always be a way to fan the
flame or build the fire of the event that transpires in the name of God.
Mark Taylor’s famously downbeat description of deconstruction as “a
hermeneutics of the death of God” is but a moment in a more upbeat
description of the theology of the event as a “hermeneutics of the desire
for God.” (ADG, 67)

In Caputo’s critical assessment, Taylor hardly observes the “/” in his a/theology,
thus failing to protect the undecidability of the question of God, and instead
allows the theos to disappear into thin air, with the result being an atheology
rather than a genuine a/theology (ADG, 68). Caputo may find, however, that
After God comes closer to an a/theology than do Taylor’s earlier works.

Caputo goes on to express apprehension about the omnibus “we” as it is used by
thinkers such as Vattimo, Altizer, and even Taylor. His worry is that a
secularized Christian triumphalism still abounds in such we-think, first and
foremost an implied triumph over Judaism as the “religion of the Father”:

My lingering worry is that the death of God theologies are themselves
thinly disguised grand récits. They are theologies of history that tell the
big story of how we go from the religion of the Father in Judaism, to the
religion of the Son in the New Testament, to the religion of the Spirit in
modernity (Altizer) or in postmodernity (Taylor), which is the Final
Story. Despite the fact that Taylor is telling us deconstruction spells the
end of the Book and of History, he does not resist this schema. Indeed he
completes or perfects it. . . . Deconstruction, which is much more
distrustful of these periodizing and incarnational schemata, has been
sent into the world (if I may be so ironic) to break up such illusions and
to dispel gospels of economic exchange in the name of the gift. (ADG,
68–69)

Given its iconoclastic role, deconstruction is “something more of a Jewish
science” that does well to resist the incarnational schemes of death of God
theologies, Caputo thinks, for fear of “filling up someone’s pocket with the
transferred goods of divinity” (ADG, 80). It is risky business to say “we” on a
global stage where many countries and religions are in play (ADG 78). It is to fail
to take religious difference seriously as the abyss between, and here Taylor is far
less culpable than are Vattimo and Altizer.

JCRT 9.3 (2008)